U.S. Report on Violence in Sudan Finds a 'Pattern of Atrocities'

By MARC LACEY

Published: August 25, 2004

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug. 24—
A preliminary State Department review of the violence waged in the Darfur region of Sudan has implicated government-backed militias in ''a consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities,'' including murder, torture, rape and ethnic humiliation.

The study, based on 257 interviews conducted in refugee settlements in neighboring Chad in the last two weeks of July, is part of the Bush administration's investigation of whether the killing in Darfur amounts to genocide. The report does not address that question directly but analyzes the chilling testimony of refugees driven from their homes in western Sudan.

The study, conducted by State Department officials together with outside legal experts, found that nearly one-third of the refugees interviewed reported hearing racial epithets while under attack, and that nearly 60 percent of them reported witnessed the killing of a family member. Twenty percent of the respondents said they had witnessed a rape and another 25 percent had witnessed beatings.

''The purpose of the report is not to come to a determination on genocide,'' said a State Department official. ''What these guys are doing is collecting firsthand information that would serve as the documentary evidence on whether the legal standard has been met.''

Genocide is defined as a calculated effort to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Congress has already declared that what has happened in Darfur, where more than million black Africans have been driven from their villages by armed Arabs, amounts to genocide. A separate review by the European Union, however, disputed that.

The Bush administration is treading carefully on the issue, wanting to pressure the Sudanese government to disarm the militias but without ruining the progress made in peace talks aimed at ending a separate civil war with southern rebels.

In the preliminary study, roughly half of the respondents said government soldiers had joined Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, in attacking black African villages. One quarter of the refugees said they were attacked by soldiers alone. Another 17 percent said militias alone attacked them.

Based on the testimony, the survey declared that ''the primary cleavage defining this conflict appears to be ethnic,'' with Arab soldiers and militia attacking non-Arab villagers.

''Numerous credible reports point to the use of racial and ethnic epithets by both the Jingaweit and GOS military personnel,'' the report said, using an alternative spelling for the militias and an abbreviation for the Government of Sudan.

Among the epithets that the interviewers reported were ''Kill the slaves'' and ''We have orders to kill all the blacks.'' One refugee reported that a militia member had stated, ''We kill all blacks and even kill our cattle when they have black calves.''

The report indicated that the extent of the killing in Darfur, which ranges from 30,000 victims to many times more, is difficult to pin down. ''Numerous accounts point to mass abductions; the respondents usually do not know the abductees' fate,'' the report said. ''A few respondents have indicated personal knowledge of mass executions and gravesites.''

The report, dated Aug. 5, is the first part of the genocide review. It will be followed up in the coming weeks by a more thorough review of 1,100 refugee interviews. To conduct them, the surveyors, known as an Atrocities Documentation Team, select each 10th dwelling and conduct their talks without the presence of any outsiders, besides an independent translator.